“In the beginning, God created…”
According to the Jewish creation story (Gen. 1-2), all creatures were shaped and formed according to our Creator’s divine voice, saying, “Let there be.” Indeed, the story of life, existence, and all reality began when the Creator spoke — the moment the Creator breathed the cosmos into existence. And this was the story that began the entire biblical narrative through which readers are introduced to the loving God who created all that is.
The great storyteller and theologian J.R.R. Tolkien understood the centrality of story and narrative in the daily experiences of the Christian life. Unlike the modern rationalism of his time that reduced the Bible to a mere collection of statements and propositions, Tolkien read the Bible first as a story — a story that helped readers imagine a new way of being in the world, thus inspiring different forms of making and creating to make the world more beautiful every day.
Through the narrative of the Bible, human beings enter the creative life that becomes the origin of “all speech and literature.”1 Suddenly, mortal women and men become bearers of truth and light to the world, becoming co-creators with the Creator in a divine and holy work, which Tolkien names the act of “sub-creation.” No longer do destructive and self-serving ways of living in the world persist as the Jewish rabbi Paul writes, “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being!”2 And this new story is that of Jesus who reveals life, beauty, and wonder to the world and all who live within it.
Thus, to reduce apologetics to propositional truths is to abstract the gospel from its narrative, from the narrative quality of its content and aesthetic. Hear me clearly: I am not saying that the gospel is not factual, nor am I denying theological realities like the incarnation or resurrection. Instead, I am arguing for a reading of the Bible that sees beyond only propositions and apprehends the creative nature (aesthetic) of the Bible as, first and foremost, a story.
It is to read the Bible as a means through which God reorients not only our minds, but also our hearts, bodies, souls, and imaginations toward the Jewish Messiah.
Indeed, reducing the scriptural narrative to propositions not only leads to abstraction from the creative nature of God’s self-disclosure in the Bible, but also limits the imaginative capacity to dream, seek, and pursue the good and holy life together. In many ways, reading the Bible as merely a collection of facts and propositional statements can become a disservice to people around us who are thirsty for new stories to reorient their lives around. Especially in today’s societies that are dominated by polarization and social schism, many are seeking to discover different ways of being in the world that engender belonging, not division. Many desire storytellers who, like the Creator of Genesis 1 and 2, speak the possibility of a new and beautiful world into existence amid the social injustices that surround us.
But are we those storytellers? Are we indeed seeking what is beautiful, good, and true?
Kirstin Johnson, “Tolkien’s Mythopoesis,” in Tree of Tales: Tolkien, Literature, and Theology (ed. Trevor Hart and Ivan Khovacs), page 27.
2 Corinthians 5:17, NRSV.